Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by iknowstuff 818 days ago
When I was building my PC the choice between RAM that can randomly flip critically important bits, and one that guarantees correctness, was rather obvious. Idk why people build machines without ECC.

Surprised that no Apple products have ECC. Anyone got any insight into why? Their RAM is not ECC, their APFS is not self healing afaik. Wrt file systems, I think at some point they said their SSDs are stable enough that they don’t care as much.
2 comments
lonjil 817 days ago
Not sure what the rate is, but Asahi Linux uncovered FS corruption on MacBooks. Before you can install Asahi, you have to do a fsck, and a bunch of people reported failures with that step.
link
MenhirMike 818 days ago
Because it's cheaper - until you actually encounter data loss.

But yeah, when it came time to build my NAS, I went with a low-end EPYC, both for the PCIe lanes for NVMe drives, but also because it's guaranteed proper ECC without having to rely on some "Technically it works, if the board vendor's BIOS plays along, but don't ask for any help if it doesn't" situation with like consumer-Ryzen chips.

link
mmh0000 817 days ago
It’s also a lot harder.

Does Intel support ECC? Last I checked it was only their enterprise cpus that did.

What about AMD, they claim to support ECC, but, then tell you that you need a compatible motherboard. Now go on Newegg and try finding an amd motherboard with documented support for ECC. It’s nearly impossible.

And im saying this as someone who has built a few AMD+ECC systems.

link
MenhirMike 817 days ago
Intel's desktop CPUs do not support ECC, you need a Xeon for that. The Xeon E would be their cheapest option, if you're okay with 20 PCIe lanes on a Raptor Lake Xeon.

And yeah, AMD's Desktop ECC support is sketchy because it's basically "Good luck finding a motherboard that supports it, and also hope the BIOS supports it". That's why I went with EPYC, because it's guaranteed.

link
nzrf 817 days ago
Intel’s newer desktop cpu support ecc. The challenge would be getting a chipset. On like w680 it is supported and fairly most chipsets don’t unsure tbh. I have a w680 and it does.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/230580/...

link